Going Nowhere Fast (9 page)

Frowning, Joe said, "Boy, you need a bath worse than I did. Go run some water in that tub and give your mother and me some privacy!"

The grin fell off Dog's face like the shingle from a roof, but he did as he was told. When he'd locked the bathroom door behind him, Joe looked at me and said, "He really pissed me off today, you know."

"I know, baby. But you know he didn't mean to."

"I was supposed to be watching him, and he gave me the slip. Five, ten years ago, he could've never done that, Dottie. Nobody could've."

"I know." I smiled at him and ran my hand along the side of his head, feeling the gray hairs prickle my palm. "We're slowing down, you and me."

"Yeah." His right hand was on my left shoulder, lightly stroking the skin beneath my blouse. It felt good.

"How long you figure he'll be in there?" Joe asked, a childish grin breaking out on his face.

"Not long enough. So forget it," I said, laughing.

"I can fix that door so he can't open it till we're ready for him to. How about it?"

"Joe, no!"

"Come on. What's the worst that can happen? We shock the boy a little bit. Hell, that might be good for him!" He leaned up on the bed to kiss me, and I kissed him right back. The old boy can kiss; he always could.

"You've got to be quiet," I told him.

"I will if you will," he said, laughing as he pulled back the covers on the bed for me.

And apart from an occasional giggle, we didn't make a sound for the next twenty minutes.

*     *     *     *

"You think maybe we should check on him?" I asked Joe when we were done, nodding at the bathroom door. Bad Dog had been every bit as silent as we had been over the last half hour.

"Naw. He's fine," Joe said, buttoning his pajama top back up. The contented expression glued to his face looked like something you'd see on a benevolent circus clown, and I had to laugh.

"Go ahead and laugh," he said, "but you'd better take a look at your own face in that mirror 'fore you do. See if you don't look just as dumb and happy as I do."

He chuckled as I went to the mirror above the dresser to see what he was talking about for myself. Sure enough, demanding center stage from my short, light brown Afro and round, generously freckled cheeks, the stupid grin was there, the same one I used to wear forty years ago, when we were teenagers just learning how fine loving sex could make us feel.

"See? What'd I tell you?" my husband teased. "Dumb and happy, just like me."

I waved my hand to shush him and gestured toward the bathroom door. I tossed a robe on and was gathering up my clothes from the floor when something caught my eye at the foot of the television set, where Bad Dog had been sitting less than an hour ago. It was a small notepad of hotel stationery and a pen, both bearing the same "Bright Angel Lodge" logo. Dog had apparently been scribbling on the pad as he watched television, writing the same thing over and over again:

Jeffrey Bettman Jeffrey Bettman Jeffrey Bettman

I handed the pad over to Joe. "Take a look at this," I said.

He examined the pad and said simply, "Uh-huh. Just as I thought."

"You know who this Jeffrey Bettman is?"

"No. But I know that's not him in our bathroom."

"Sounds very similar to 'Geoffry Bettis,' doesn't it?"

"Yeah. Very similar."

"I don't suppose that could just be a wild coincidence."

"That's not his handwriting, Dottie."

"No. It isn't, is it?"

Joe handed me back the notepad and said, "Put it back where you found it. Leave everything the way it was."

"He's copying that man's signature."

"Yeah." Joe nodded. "That's what it looks like to me."

"From what?"

"I don't know. But I'm gonna find out. Only this time, I'm not gonna bother askin' him. 'Cause, obviously, that's just a waste of time. We're ever gonna get to the truth about all this, we're gonna have to get it out of him the hard way. I see that now."

The sudden sound of more hot water being run in the tub startled me, and I turned, but Dog did not emerge from the bathroom.

"What do you mean, the hard way?" I asked, looking at Joe again.

"I mean we're not gonna find out anything by putting him on a short leash. We've tried that, and it doesn't work. It's like the old saying goes: 'A watched pot never boils.' Only way that boy's gonna lead us to the truth is by accident. Meanin' from now on, we've gotta let him go about his business alone, by himself, and let him think nobody's watching. Except that we will be, of course. Only from a distance this time."

I nodded, agreeing with him, and placed the notepad and pen in their original places on the floor as he had directed.

Our son emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, one towel wrapped around his waist as he dried his hair with another. He was singing some rap song I didn't recognize, vocally recreating all those
boomp-boomp, ba-dathump, ba-da-thump
noises that kids today call music. Starting toward the bathroom to take my own bath, I watched out of the corner of my eye as he spotted the notepad on the floor, hesitated for a moment, then slid his right foot over the carpet nonchalantly to kick it under the bed, confident that he hadn't been seen.

Big Joe and I nodded at each other.

Ten minutes later, I lay stretched out in a tubful of lukewarm water, wondering if I ever wanted to get out. Because the truth about my son could not find me here in the bath; the truth was out there with him. Not knowing what that truth was, how innocent or how terrible, was upsetting in itself, yes, but there was some comfort in it. For horrible suspicions were still just suspicions, after all; horrible knowledge was something else entirely. Knowledge was real and inescapable; it could be a dream made solid, or your worst fears etched in stone.

And the knowledge of Bad Dog's role in the murder of Geoffry Bettis was just outside the door to my right, waiting for me to come looking for it with the dawn.

I didn't leave that tub until the water was too cold to stand a moment longer.

6

Thursday morning, we all ate breakfast together at the hotel restaurant, then went our separate ways. Or at least, that's what Joe and I led Dog to believe we did. We told him we were going to drive down into town to the amphitheater there to see some wraparound Grand Canyon film all the brochures claimed was a don't miss, and naturally, as we knew he would, Dog pleaded on bended knee not to join us. For appearance's sake, Joe went through the motions of demanding he come along, but after a few minutes, the two of us just threw up our hands in a show of joint disgust and let him be, allowing him to think he'd somehow finally won an argument with his father.

We drove our pickup all the way out to the park's front gate, then turned around at the loop there to double back. We parked in front of the visitors' center and walked the remaining hundred yards or so to the hotel, staying in the woods among the trees and off the foot trails so Dog wouldn't spot us if we ran into him coming the other way. Which, as it happened, is exactly what we did. Joe poked me in the ribs and pointed, and there Dog was: walking west along the edge of the main road toward us, his bushy head down and his eyes fixed on the earth ahead, moving like a man with a purpose.

Joe and I each found a tree to hide behind and watched as Dog followed the side road leading to the village proper. We let him build a decent lead, then followed slowly after him, moving up just a few steps at a time to keep the distance between us constant. There was a cafeteria, gift shop, bank, post office, and general store in the village square, but Dog gave us no clue as to which of the five was his destination until he hit the parking lot and began angling over to the post office. To say that that confused me would be an understatement. Here the boy hadn't written his mother a decent letter in over ten years, and the first chance in three days he had to be alone, he was sneaking off to visit a post office.

Or was he?

He was up on the post office's porch, seemingly ready to go inside, when he suddenly veered right and started for the little bank next door instead.

"Now, what does that boy want with a bank?" Joe asked as Dog disappeared inside, more thinking out loud than conversing with me.

"I don't know," I said, starting to feel a little lightheaded. "But all he's been talking about since he came here is money. Money, money, money." I paused, almost afraid to go on. "Joe, you don't suppose—"

"No," my husband said quickly, shaking his head back and forth to defuse my unfinished thought. "He's not that crazy. I took his gun away, remember? A man can't rob a bank without a gun."

That wasn't true, and he knew it, but he was trying to dispel his own fears as well as my own, and I imagined he couldn't think of anything more reassuring to say.

"Well? Are you going in there after him, or am I?" I asked after a while.

"I'll go," he said. "You stay right here."

"Where? Out here in the middle of the parking lot?"

"No. Go over there by the gift shop." He pointed to show me the way. "And stay there unless I signal you to duck inside. Like this." He made a little bye-bye wave with his right hand.

I nodded to show him I understood, and then he was gone.

I took my designated position in front of the gift shop and turned back around to watch as Joe trotted over to the bank, narrowly avoiding a collision with a station wagon as overloaded with kids as it was piled high with luggage. The overweight driver behind the wheel shouted something ugly out at Joe, and Joe returned the favor, but that was as far as their altercation went. He didn't know it, but the driver was lucky; any other time, Joe would have taken a few minutes to show the loudmouth just how far one of the sleeping bags tied to the station wagon's roof could be forced into a man's left ear. Or down his throat. Or…

I think you get the idea.

Anyway, Big Joe reached the bank's double doors, but did not go inside. He just stood outside and to the right of them to peer through their glass panels into the tiny bungalow's interior. It occurred to me eventually that that was all he could do; the building was so small, it would have been impossible to enter it without being seen by everyone inside, Bad Dog included. I had no idea what kind of view he had of Dog from where he stood, but I assumed it was good because he never moved an inch to improve it.

A long ten minutes passed. I didn't like the waiting, but at the same time, I was relieved by it. Whatever else our son was doing inside that bank, I realized, he wasn't trying to rob it. Joe would have rushed in to stop him by now if he were.

I had taken all the standing around I could take when Joe finally and abruptly backed away from the bank's doors to alert me that Dog was coming. But he never gave me his time-to-get-out-of-sight wave. He just retreated far enough from the bank's entrance to avoid being spotted when Dog appeared; then he slipped up behind our son as he started back across the parking lot in my direction. Dog was ripping open a medium-size manila envelope as he walked, showing all the patience of a child tearing into a gift on his birthday. He was entirely taken aback when Joe poked a finger in his left side, then began using his weight to guide Dog over to where I was standing, dancing uneasily on the balls of my feet. For a black man, Dog didn't have much color to begin with, but in the few short minutes it took him to be brought before me, I watched him turn as deathly pale as a nauseated albino.

"Hello, Theodore," I said. The chill in my voice could have frosted a drinking glass.

"Moms. Hey," he said, trying his best to make a smile form on his face. "I thought—"

"You thought we were going into town. Yes, I know. Your father and I wanted you to think that, Theodore."

"Sure did," Joe said. "We set ourselves a little trap, and hell if you didn't walk straight into it."

Bad Dog looked from his father's face to mine, back to Joe's, then back to mine again, apparently trying to decide upon whose mercy he should throw himself. "Moms—"

"Moms, nothing. I'm ashamed of you, Theodore. We both are. We've given you every opportunity to tell us the truth about your involvement in Mr. Bettis's death, and all you've done is lie, lie, lie. You've lied to us, and you've lied to the police. But that's all going to come to a stop right now. And I do mean this instant!"

"But, Moms, I didn't
do
anything! All I did was—"

"Walk into that bank, pretend to be somebody named Jeffrey Bettman, and steal the contents of his safety deposit box," Big Joe said, fuming.

"Joe, he didn't," I said, aghast.

"Oh yes he did. I stood right over there and saw the whole thing!"

"Then he
did
rob Mr. Bettis!"

"No!" Bad Dog cried. "I didn't rob nobody! All I did was take the man's wallet, that's all!"

"That's 'all'? Theodore, that's terrible!" I said.

"I guess you know where we're all goin' now, don't you, boy?" Joe asked him, sounding more like a cold and bullying cop than he had ever actually been. "Or do I have to tell you?"

He started marching Dog down the road, out of the village, and I followed close behind them.

"Pops, please! Let's leave the police out of this, all right?"

"I think we've left them out of it long enough, Theodore," I said. "Don't you?"

"Moms, listen to me! I wasn't tryin' to steal nothin'! I was just tryin' to help you an' Pops get off the hook for Bettis's murder! I only got this stuff out of his safety deposit box 'cause I thought there might be somethin' in there could prove you guys didn't kill the man!"

"Oh, Jeez Looweez," Joe sneered, rolling his eyes skyward. I'd wondered when those wonderfully expressive "Jeez Looweezes" of his were coming.

"I swear, it's the truth! I was just lookin' for some
evidence!
"

" 'Evidence'? Evidence of
what?
"

"I don't know. I ain't had a chance to look in the envelope yet!"

Finally, Dog had said something to earn himself a reprieve. Big Joe stopped walking.